


Better Than You

by tonytonesphoneroo5000



Category: Hellboy (2019), Hellboy - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Ghosts, Protectiveness, Romance, Softness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 08:15:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20561117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tonytonesphoneroo5000/pseuds/tonytonesphoneroo5000
Summary: Hellboy doesn't care what people say about him. Alice does.A series of snapshots from their relationship.





	Better Than You

**Author's Note:**

> hellboy 2019 FUCKS

“Hellboy’s around again. He’s visiting Daimio.” 

“I mean...ugly loves ugly.”

“Look, Ben’s just scarred. Hellboy is fucking _hideous_.”

“God, can you imagine waking up next to a face like that?”

Alice doesn’t look up from her food, but she does turn an ear towards the other agents in the canteen. They mostly avoid her; too many of them have seen one spirit or another come spiralling out of her mouth. 

“I can,” Alice pipes up. They turn towards her as one, surprised. She holds their gaze. “I _do_.” She gets to her feet, no longer hungry for the crappy fish and chips this place serves. She hopes they can’t see her blushing, and swings her dreads in front of her face to hide it. Their dead comrades watch balefully. One scratches a caved-in nose, elbowing his partner in her exposed ribs. No one really understands that the dead are always there, if they want to be. Alice’s parents have never left her side, not really. Not unless she asks them to. “And you can fuck off, too,” she hisses at the dead agents. “I will punch the soul out of you.” They dissolve into dust as Alice turns on her heel and strides out. 

* * *

B.R.P.D. agents gossip like old women. Alice has barely left the building before Hellboy is catching up with her in long, easy strides she can’t hope to outrun. “Alice...Hey! Alice. Wait.” He doesn’t grab her, though he could. He’s too aware of his own strength. 

She slows and looks up at him. She likes his face. She likes his weird eyes and his craggy cheekbones and his shaved down horns. The agents are just petty and human. Alice is...something else, she thinks. Human, but not entirely. Not after the fairies got ahold of her. “What’s up, mate?”

People around them are staring, though neither Alice nor Hellboy notice anymore. 

“Heard some things.”

“People talk,” she dismisses, moving around the ghost of a Victorian child. 

“Maybe.” 

She knows he’d be willing to leave it at that, his confidence being mostly bravado. 

“He almost ended the world, cookie,” her mum whispers in her ear. Alice brushes her aside. 

“I hate when they say that bloody bullshit about you.” 

“So they were, uh, serious? About you defending me.” She can’t bring herself to look at him, and nods instead. He eyes her for a moment, before his mouth curves up in a smile; he trails the index of his stone hand down her back. A shiver chases them down Alice’s spine.

* * *

She had tried to kiss the fingers of his right hand on their first date, which seems to work on most people, male or female. He’d pulled it back, settled it in his lap. “It’s probably best you don’t put your mouth on that. It’s been...a lot of places, and you know how stoneware absorbs everything.” Alice had barked a surprised laugh, and held his hand instead. 

* * *

Alice makes tea alone in her apartment. Not that she’s ever really alone, unless she insists. “You should eat more greens, duckie,” her father says, peering over her shoulder. They had tried to put Alice with a foster family when they died. She hadn’t been able to explain that her parents never left, not really.

Her mother helped her with her resume, wafting papers across the room, and her father is _constantly_ telling her to change her diet. Alice sighs, waves a hand.

The small girl that died here sometime in the 80s sits at Alice’s kitchen table, swinging her legs. One of her shoes is missing. So is one of her eyes. “Come along, kiddo,” Alice’s father says, offering the little girl a hand. What’s left of his hand. It was crushed up against the steering wheel in the accident. “Her boyfriend is coming.” 

Alice has told her parents to stop coming around when Hellboy is here; they like him well enough, but something makes them have to warn her about the apocalypse whenever he’s around. Alice turns as her father and the little girl disappear, to see Hellboy bend his head as he steps through her door. She has to go to her toes to kiss him, but she’s used to it. He tugs gently at one of her dreads, teases, “You save any for me?” 

“It’s tea.”

He grimaces. An Englishman raised him, but it was in the States. He hates tea. 

“There’s coffee in the pot.” 

He kisses her again, once, against the temple. “You’re good to me.” 

* * *

Living with Hellboy was rough, at first. Alice talks, all the time, to people who don’t seem to be there. It’s hard for living people to, well, live with that. The first time Hellboy came in and saw the little dead girl hand Alice the salt shaker, he freaked. He’s still a little uncomfortable taking showers. And for Alice, it’s difficult when he leaves a trenchcoat soaked in goblin blood on her living room floor. They’ve learned to deal with it. He leaves his stuff on a plastic mat, and Alice told her usual household ghosts to leave him alone when he’s in the bathroom. 

After a year together, Alice has found more happiness than she thought she could ever have. Sometimes they go on missions to kill demons with as many eyes as teeth, and more tentacles than both of those. Other times, they order takeout from the Thai place down the street, and watch A Series of Unfortunate Events until they fall asleep, Alice swallowed up by Hellboy’s bulk. Both are equally as good.

* * *

She takes his hand on the street, doesn’t tell him he’s walking through a very confused soldier who died during the Blitz. 

“Where am I, mum?” the soldier asks Alice, who shoots him a sympathetic smile. 

“I’ll come back to you later,” she promises. Hellboy glances down, a confused look on his craggy face. 

“You need something, gorgeous?”

She grins up at him, allows herself to be soft for once. “Just you.” The smile on his face could outshine the sun.


End file.
